Panel to recommend immigration overhaul

WASHINGTON, July 8 (UPI) -- The United States should overhaul its immigration system to respond to national security concerns, an immigration task force recommends.

The bipartisan congressional task force's proposals, to be presented Wednesday, also recommend the country end strict quotas on work-based immigrant visas to keep its edge in the scientific, technological and military fields, The Washington Post reported.

"The continued failure to devise and implement a sound and sustainable immigration policy threatens to weaken America's economy, to jeopardize its diplomacy and to imperil its national security," said the independent Council on Foreign Relations panel, co-chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Thomas McLarty III, the former Clinton White House chief of staff.

The panel did not recommend allowing more guest workers. Instead, it supported a 2006 recommendation by the Migration Policy Institute to create a standing commission to establish future legal immigration levels based on economic conditions, the Post said. Other recommendations urged more robust border enforcement and a mandatory work-document verification system based on eye scans or fingerprints.

The panel also recommended the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States be allowed to earn legalization, not receive amnesty. To stay in the United States, illegals would have to pay taxes, learn English, pass background checks, pay fines and wait their turn behind legal immigrants.

"(The panel's) basic principles are similar to ours," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of an immigration subcommittee taking the lead on reform legislation, said in a statement, "but there are lots of details that must be filled in."